Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman
(1888-1970)

Indian physicist whose work was influential in the growth of science
in India. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930
for the discovery that when light traverses a transparent material,
some of the light that is deflected changes in wavelength. This phenomenon
is now called Raman scattering and is the result of the Raman effect.
After earning a master's degree in physics at Presidency College, University
of Madras, in 1907, Raman became an accountant in the finance department
of the Indian government. He became professor of physics at the University
of Calcutta in 1917. Studying the scattering of light in various substances,
in 1928 he found that when a transparent substance is illuminated by
a beam of light of one frequency, a small portion of the light emerges
at right angles to the original direction, and some of this light is
of different frequencies than that of the incident light. These so-called
Raman frequencies are equal to the infrared frequencies for the scattering
material and are caused by the exchange of energy between the light
and the material.

Raman was knighted in 1929, and in 1933 he moved to the Indian Institute
of Science, at Bangalore, as head of the department of physics. In 1947
he was named director of the Raman Research Institute there and in 1961
became a member of the Pontifical Academy of Science. He contributed
to the building up of nearly every Indian research institution in his
time, founded the Indian Journal of Physics and the Indian Academy of
Sciences, and trained hundreds of students who found important posts
in universities and government in India and Myanmar (Burma).